Sunday, November 29, 2020

The Neverending Drachenschwanz #1

 

The Neverending Drachenschwanz #1

SIMPLY PUT!

This might be the greatest RPG FKR Zine ever written! 

https://www.docdroid.net/l8Dy11z/the-neverending-drachenschwanz-1-pdf



Thursday, November 12, 2020

Reevaluating my non-gamer life Part 2: Good news a new fire is burning.

 CAUTION! LANGUAGE AND SAD STORY!


Reevaluating my non-gamer life Part 2: Good news a new fire is burning.


It has been quite a while since I have posted on my blog. Time has went by and it has been cruel. while I was writing the last blog post I was at a job that absolutely took all my free time. it had pretty much killed all chances of having any kind of gaming life that involved a campaign. My wife would also not want to go game because she also (supposedly) wanted to be a part of a campaign. I suddenly out of the blue get laid off while the job still had a few months left. What was sad is we had a guy that they had hired that was a former client troublemaker, anyway they hired him to solve all the problems that he had caused with our company. Kind of an indirect way to get revenge. But a snake is always a snake and a worm is always a worm. A BITCH IS ALWAYS A BITCH! This guy was watching our workers worked out in 105° temperature stacking scaffold material to be sent back to the office and claimed they were not doing enough even though he didn't know jack s*** about scaffolding. He got some people from our main office involved and got us all ran off the job in disgrace. I just know this is for as long as I live I will make sure that that guy doesn't get hired if there's anything I can do about it. 

I am probably going to make an NPC in honor of this piece of dog s***. It will probably be something disgusting like a half-goblin that lives in a toilet or something.


Now during this time I'd actually started to get weekends off and I actually started trying to get some people together to do some gaming and also I was going to clean out my Mead Hall which is my building that I use for gaming in as my wife and daughters had filled it up with her crap and we were possibly supposed to move as well but since that was not going to happen anytime soon I was getting my goddamn building back so I can do some goddamn gaming. 

Like I had posted before we tried to do gaming in the living room but that's not my style I have a 4 foot by 8 foot 1 inch grid dry erase board that I set across two tables it's literally fits the content of four sheets of graph paper maybe a little bit bigger! 

So like I was saying I suddenly get laid off and the only job I can find is with the same company scanning temperatures at a gate at less than half pay. One thing this job did afford me was I would work 6 days with two half days in between and then I would have 6 days off. I finally actually had a massive amount of free time something I have not had in over 10 years. 


This was also a time because here in Southwest Louisiana it's incredibly hot. It's not just hot it's also the goddamn humidity. Seriously you cannot stand outside without the sweat dripping on your back going down the crack of your ass. pretty much guaranteed if you're wearing lots of clothes like we do in the plants, you will beginning some kind of heat rash or skin problem. Not to mention massively bad sunburns and such. The sun literally Cooks your guts out.

Wouldn't you know it that in my goddamn Mead Hall the m************ air conditioner would have to go out! 

Just as I have started to have free time and started having the ability to clean out my building the worst case scenario happens and I'm also making less than half pay so cannot possibly afford a new air conditioner so once again my gaming life is set at a delay. One of the other issues as I've stated before is that termites had got into my building and ate a bunch of my books and they have also eaten some of the walls as well. They have long since been eradicated from the existence of this universe by massive amount of poisoning hope I live through it myself but they are f****** gone but the damage is done. 

I finally find a stack of Star Wars role-playing game saga edition along with the second revised printing of 2nd edition West end games Star Wars and a stack of bunch of other Star Wars content. I find a very awesome dude who wanted those books in the past that I make him a hell of a deal for about 150 bucks for $500 worth of books which is about the price of a small air conditioner. Life is finally going to work out and I'm going to finally be able to get gaming started in my Mead Hall I happily hook up the air conditioner find more termite damage much to my f****** anger but I still hook that bastard up and we now have climate control in the super hot ass building. But wouldn't you know?

Life never f****** gives me a goddamn break!

The day before I am scheduled to start cleaning out my building BITCHASS Hurricane Laura decides to show up in Southwest Louisiana and f****** destroy everything! 

ARGH! 

If you haven't went around and looked at some of the videos on YouTube of the aftermath of hurricane Laura so you can comprehend how bad it is over here people literally are homeless living in tents and some will never ever never get their house back. 

You have to be a complete f****** idiot not to insure your house when you live in a hurricane zone but there are some people that are that stupid. And before you call me a judgmental a****** one of the people in question that I'm speaking of who had no house insurance has two or three four wheelers and about two or three side by sides he spends money on other s*** farm more expensive than the small amount that house insurance is in this area.

So we are now suddenly without electricity without water luckily my Mead Hall that I had tied down (and that is the secret of hurricanes not destroying your stuff is too tie them down) so they can't be blown over and blow off survived. 

Wouldn't you know just as we get electricity back and get everything going mother f****** Hurricane Delta comes and hits our area although nowhere is near as bad but for some people that already had a damaged roof with a hole in it a mirror category 2 hurricane (by the way Laura was a four when it hit us at 160 mph winds) it tends to destroy stuff even more so. So I got over the aftermath of that and have been chugging along.

I actually get to do one session of gaming with a good friend the guy that I sold the Star Wars books to and get to try out Pathfinder second edition finally. I can't say I totally dislike it I do say that it is a giant way too many rule convoluted mess of chunky rules. Though I do see it's appeal with the ability to completely customize your characters to the nth degree. This group also knows that I am a dungeon master and wants me to run a campaign for them.

So now finally everything seems to be going okay except the universe f****** hates me.

Now my dad has had health problems for quite a while at the age of 85 he recently had a heart valve transplant and is never quite gotten better recovered fully from it. The doctors keep screwing around with his medications and such trying to get him straightened out. 

But wouldn't you know after Hurricane Laura and then hurricane Delta my dad's somewhat got off his medications that he was supposed to be on and from there he has went downhill. 

So now my dad is in the hospital and it's not looking good he had a massive fluid buildup in his legs and almost had congestive heart failure. He also within a 3-week period has completely lost most of his thought processes and is in a very confused delirious state. This of course has disrupted my entire life once again. It is really painful to see your parent, the last one I have left suffering and going through really bad times like this. It is confusion he keeps trying to stand up and walk which he cannot do so unfortunately they had to restrain him to the bed which is pretty f****** horrible to see.

So as you can see my life is once again in shambles and I am a gamer who can't seem to get any game. The other day I halfway cleaned the Mead Hall but did not get finished. I plan to try and finish it real soon maybe actually roll some dice and run some great games to get rid of all this stress. I don't know about you but way back in the days of middle school and high school Dungeons and Dragons was what I used to help me escape from many of the problems in my life. It literally helps me cope with many things and was a great relief of stress that (not always LOL!) didn't include alcohol or drugs.

In my younger days while we were gaming it completely kept us out of trouble. In adulthood I found it to be one of the most inexpensive forms of entertainment that one could possibly do.

I am not talking about you Warhammer people you guys are f****** crazy with your amount of money that you spend lol!


So where is this post going? 

Well I'm hoping that my dad recovers and can come back home if not we're facing the super hard decision of having to put him in a rest home and then we're going to be left with his house which I have a little tiny house and my older brother still lives there who has nothing. I would love to keep the house but since my brother never got off his ass his entire life cannot possibly afford the place we could literally keep the house and use it as a gaming center. But unfortunately I'm going to have to sell it so my brother will have a place to live and the family home of almost 60 years is going to be gone forever. Strangely enough the neighbor girl that I grew up with has also moving after being there for about 60 years as well...


My God this post has been extremely long but what's the point? 

Well the point is is that I'm going to get the Mead Hall cleaned out and put my tables back up I say to the universe f*** you in your eye you piece of s***!!! 

F*** you and where you came from you're not going to stop me from f****** gaming you've done everything in your power to make sure I can't and I'm still going to f****** do it f*** you universe. I am going to game or I'm going to f****** die trying. The point is a new fire is burning and I will not let this b******* in constant barrage of suckiness win.

I hope some of you out there that are gamers that are working too much and you're not quite in your 50s like I am realize that you are working too much. We need to wake up and look around and see if you're actually living life.

If you're not, do so.

The last 10 years I've had no work-life balance it was just work work work work work balance no life at all. Don't be a victim of your own success and not live any life. If you're a gamer get out there and do some gaming stop doing other stuff that's wasteful and doesn't get you anywhere. This is like a new era like the '80s except no satanic panic.

Sees this time and especially we OSR gamers teach these youngsters how to use the fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons rules to play like we did in the old days... 

Well I guess that's all I have got all the thoughts that I need to share at this point in time. I hope this humble narrator of this sad tragic tale has given you some entertainment and some food for thought. I hope that the next blog post that I put down is going to be a bunch of good news about gaming and it possibly my father will have recovered completely but we shall see. 

That's if our entire nation does not fall apart and we're not in some kind of new stupid ass civil war...

UPDATE: 11/16/2020 MY DAD DIED. 

Thursday, February 13, 2020

Reevaluating My RPG Gamer (NON) Life

CAUTION LANGUAGE!




After the 4E Apocalypse and the OSR

Well my old group from back in 2006-2009, well some of the people started to suck and make it not so fun anymore. We we're glad to have a new game due to our collapsed 3.5 game raped by a rules lawyer bastard and a weak ass too nice of a DM (Me)! Also 4E was starting to suck and not really be fun anymore as well and it was time to disband the group.
A profound disregard for my suggestions of trying other RPGs because they had spent money on books while sitting in my $5000+ Meade Hall with $20,000+ in game books.

A void in gaming! Working out of town. Chaos! It all fell apart. People got lots of criticisms, and wants but can they run the game?

Well my wife bought a copy of Mathfinder and with a few of the select non sucky people we tried that. My out of town job started to interfere as Mathfinder is a lot of work. A perfect system but too much system. I just didn't have time to set the game up. Tried to switch over to Labyrinth Lord as the Dungeon was originally written for that but the group said hell no and so I pulled the plug on that one.

DAMN so much time has went by! 

While all this was going on I read over and over the complaints about the old systems but the love of the simplicity across the OSR blogs and forums. I kept seeing the same complaints so I went to make the perfect neoclone hybrid. The simple D20 mechanics and options mixed with the old school simplicity. I gave body and soul as working turnarounds took all my time but also late at night and on weekends gave me time to create and write with unlimited access to computers and printers and so I wrote. Back to the Dungeon RPG came out well but I was always dissatisfied. I released it back in 2012 then to my dismay the announcement of the new 5E came out. I thought damn I got bad timing but I have worked so hard on Back to the Dungeon RPG. The OSR is going to eat this up, a perfect merging of the Old and New school styles playing at the same table. Totally easy to run and tell stories! Then I noticed something worse than being rejected, no reaction.

A Small Start with BttDRPPG

I didn't give up, 5E wasn't coming out until 2014 (on my Birthday) so I could carve me a little piece of the market. I started chugging out supplements and modules. I stopped giving it away and put it on DriveThruRPG and actually got a few responses and sales as well as a stellar review. My style is primitive old zine style because some of us old people don't know how to edit documents like a boss. 

Still it never took off but I knew some local Game Masters so I was going to fill the pre 5E void with a local scene.  Mostly it was going to really kick ass and be totally fun to do! A giant collaboration of people all creating one gaming world! There was this huge void in the area of gaming as in campaigns starting and dying all over the area. My timing would be perfect, giant organized gaming on a local scale! 5E came out but I had momentum..

BUT...

BttDRPPG the Local Scene Dream that Became a Nightmare.
To my amazement none of the stuck in the mud turd GMs didn't even attempt to even read my rules or collaborate. I explained this Grand vision of a local gaming scene as well as multiple Game Masters collaboration of Homebrew settings.  A few of them only played the old stuff or didn't want to learn another system even though mine was 15 minutes or so to learn. I did get some of them to play and the adventures flowed, only through me. Got tired of running shit, wanted to play. But as usual my new job killed everything.

As a side note, two of those GMs actually asked me to "take a look at or help me write and publish a game" but that's a different story. Shortened version, none of them even barely got their games written cuz "man writing an RPG iz hard!" Yeah no shit Sherlock.

Jobfuck and Gamedeath

The old job was taking up all my time and through betrayal and the company being done with me after using me all up I got laid off. The new job killed all free time as well as shit breaking down at my house, as well as my Meade Hall being filled with various people's crap because we were supposed to move, so no gaming space! Back to the Dungeon adventures flowed but got farther a fewer in-between. I decided to retire my BttDRPG as it just got too hard to try and put it out there. I was a little black and white zine compared to a full colored behemoth.


5E came out and I saw a very robust community out there and all my BttDRPPG gaming had came to a stop. Well I started messing with 5E because hell, nobody was digging my brand and it was surprisingly much better that I initially read.  We started gaming in my cramped ass living room but as if on cue my stupid job starts working soul raping amounts of hours and kills all my gaming once again. 

What sucked is my 5E games went really incredibly well and they were really fun but that fucking soul raping malignant job made sure gaming was ruined! Other than at the local con I have not gamed in almost 10 months and life sucks.  I am not doing it anymore in my cramped ass living room muddy shithole outside along with 3 dogs and I don't have anywhere else to put the crap stuffed in my Meade Hall as well as a few other reasons..

Termites and the Great Awakening

One thing I did have was a collection, a legendary gaming collection. But looking at systems other than 5E that had been sitting around for 20+ years it was time to maybe sell them. I decided to first sell all my 3.5 RPG books for like half the cover price. Got the deal set up. Guy on his way to meet me. I pull some of the books and one falls the fuck apart as termite shit and filth falls out instead of pages of the goddamn book. Like half the fucking books eaten by foul little asshole termites. Went through the wall and just to my huge collection of 3.5 books! I already am overworked and at a breaking point so I flip the fuck out and spray the fuck out of the wall with termite spray. Took a huge loss on my sale price.

I check around that shelf and it appears they only went after those books. I was wrong.

I made a deal with a pretty cool Pathfinder player and had all my books sold that were on an entirely different shelf. Most of the books were in very good to perfect condition, that was until those books were also eaten and I had to take a huge loss on the price.

Fuck it. I just don't give a fuck about collecting anything anymore. 

A (not so) Great Awakening! 

Sold my Cyberpunk 2020 and all my AD&D collection for less than half price before those God forsaken termites ate those. They also got into the 4E books but who cares. Still got some more to sell but my job schedule is starting to resuck. Hopefully a new position with SOME free time is on its way. I have tried to move stuff around in my Meade Hall and it's maybe going to become usable soon. I am going to add an outside bathroom as well.

Can't get no Satisfaction!

I still had my writing and publishing once in awhile. That's one release I can do to get some kind of gaming related activities in but it seems I can't even do that. I am not getting the reaction I want from my RPG projects other than it's kinda good, but what about a play report? Has anyone played any of my modules after all these years? Did they delve deep in the Black Stairs? No play report s anywhere. I am slowly realizing that I am playing music nobody wants to hear. Total waste of time if it's for nothing.  I will try and finish some of my projects, MAYBE bit it's time to change gears.  Worst of all is I don't have my creative space anymore and if I have to burn or throw my family's crap that they decided to store in my building, I will.

Back to the Basics, Fuck the World!

I am not going to be typing up any of my new projects anymore with the anticipation of selling them. I am going back to my old gaming roots. All on paper, scratchy drawings and maps on graph paper. All hand written dice rolled stuff. I am just going to create stuff for my own personal games. I may still in the future try and start the Adventurer's Guild Unlimited (My idea for an "unofficial" organized play like AL) but I will be concentrating on the fun of creating once again. 

Got a few "open" projects to finish but maybe I will and maybe I won't...

I am anticipating a new position where I will have this free time soon. I have looked back at my life and for the last 10-12 years I have worked too much. 

I AM DONE. 

I will also be moving, getting a trailer, or building another house and setting myself up for a life of ease amongst the trees, drinking spirits, cooking exotic meals, gardening, rolling dice and gaming...

ANON!

Monday, January 13, 2020

DEATH DUGEONS, MEAT GRINDERS and DUNGEONPUNKS


There is a little project that I have been working on. Here is a Hint of what it will be called. 




DEATH DUGEONS, MEAT GRINDERS and DUNGEONPUNKS


In this game the Death Master IS trying to kill your character.





Stripped down. Adult Content. Violent beyond all other games. FUCK Grammar and Spellchecking!





PRIMITIVE ZINE STYLE!!! 





The Death Master is trying to kill you.





3D6 in order 6 times in four columns and your hit points and keep what you roll. Flawed or great by the roll of the dice but all equally doomed! IF you don't like it then FUCK YOU go play something else. THIS RPG gives you NOTHING! You must earn every Fucking XP that you get.




UNLIKE other modern RPGs there is no Min-Maxing and Character Optimization like a bunch of little fucking pussies! 





You get what the dice god MASLIF gives you. 




IF you don't like it, then FUCK YOU and go play something else!




An 18 is going to mean something again.




There is no schedule for when this is going to get completed but one day I will release a print your own fold over ZINE for it. Depending on the response, I will make more content. You bet your ass that when I make an dungeon or setting it will be trying to kill your characters. 




Only the clever and the lucky will survive.